Tuesday, May 3, 2011

SCOTT: I think the first Salander movie ran into a serious problem when it tried to translate Larsson’s anger about pervasive sexual violence into cinematic terms. It is in the nature of the moving image to give pleasure, and in the nature of film audiences — consciously or not, admittedly or not — to find pleasure in what they see. So in depicting Salander’s rape by her guardian in the graphic way he did, the director, Niels Arden Oplev, ran the risk of aestheticizing, glamorizing and eroticizing it, just as Gaspar Noé did with Monica Bellucci’s assault in “Irreversible.”

The risk is not dissolved but rather compounded when the answering, avenging violence is staged and shot in almost exactly the same kind of gruesome detail, since the audience knows it is supposed to enjoy that. In other words, even though the earlier violation can be said to justify the later revenge, that logic turns out to be reversible. You could call this the “I Spit on Your Grave” paradigm. It is definitely at work in “Sucker Punch,” which gains in sleaziness by coyly keeping its rape fantasies within PG-13 limits and fairly quivering with ecstasy as it contemplates scenes of female victimization.

...

Jean-Luc Godard posited that all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. (Some of his later work makes me wish he had stuck to that formula.) To put the gun in the hands of the girl may be a way to cut out the middleman, as it were, and also, as you suggest, to maximize commercial potential by providing something for everyone. I think that calculation works best when the filmmakers show some interest in exploring the complex intertwinings of sex and violence, rather than simply mashing them up or using one as a substitute for the other. On the other hand, it’s sometimes just fun to watch Saoirse Ronan or Ellen Page — or all the other sisters of Angelina Jolie, our era’s pioneering and still supreme female action star — beat up some deserving Badman.

2 comments:

I feel sorry for those two having to come up with something coherent to say regarding a trend that probably doesn't exist except as a response to issues of supply -- an unusually large number of attractive younger actors -- and demand -- violent action movies.

Unfortunately, there's a certain edge of unreality about the enterprise.... Scott wins at the end for saying, in effect, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Although many points should be deducted for the unbearably fatuous assertion that " What fuels these fantasies is also a deep anxiety — an unstable compound of confusion, fascination, panic and denial — about female sexuality, especially the sexual power and vulnerability of girls and young women."

Seen and raised by Dargis's unintelligible point that somehow "Birth of a Nation" is implicated in the male anxiety about female sexual power.

"What fuels these fantasies is also a deep anxiety — an unstable compound of confusion, fascination, panic and denial — about female sexuality, especially the sexual power and vulnerability of girls and young women."

Overstated but not fatuous, IMO, as you would perhaps be in a better position to recognize if you were not happily married.